It seems reasonable to assume that students with high motivation have a better chance to do well in your courses than students who are unmotivated—or worse, negatively motivated. This begs the question of how we might enhance our students’ motivation.

Before we get to this, we should consider whether or not it is our responsibility as professors to even acknowledge student motivation at all. By this I mean, isn’t it sufficient that students pay their tuition to come and sit in our classes, and shouldn’t this be motivation enough all on its own? I don’t have a solid answer to this, but what I do know is that over the years, I’ve changed my philosophical perspective that it is my job to help students learn how to learn rather than cleverly download facts into their brains. The truth is that five years from now, I want them to think astronomy is “cool” more than I want them to know the numerical diameter of Saturn. That means that the astronomy class needs to be a transformative experience for them—which isn’t the same thing as just having a great time. Its about them being different as a human being because they’ve taken astronomy, and I want that different to be a positive transformation, rather than a negative one. Taken together, I think it is important that we pay attention to enhancing our students’ motivation, if for no other reason than to not engender negative motivation about learning astronomy.

Perhaps surprisingly, your course syllabus is the most tangible means by which you can quickly establish a positive “course climate.” This is important because, if you’ve read your faculty evaluation forms from previous semesters, you might have noticed that there are usually several items that specifically attend to the nature of the “course climate” or “classroom environment” you established. For instance:

“The instructor established and maintained a respectful and welcoming learning environment from the first day of class”

“The instructor´s direction in this course is free from attitudes/actions demeaning to women and minorities.”

“This instructor seems aware of my needs, abilities, and interests.”

These are not items on which you desire a low score, yet I suspect, that these are the items that angry students will use to tank you at the end of the term. So what about getting good marks here, and as a side note, actually creating a better classroom climate?

One framework of classroom environments characterizes classrooms along a continuous spectrum that looks something like this:

As you might guess, you do not want to be on the far left side of this spectrum if you want to have positive teaching evaluations.

Unfortunately, most courses are characterized as “implicitly marginalizing.” An implicitly marginalizing class is one that “excludes certain groups of people, but in subtle and indirect ways.” To put this to use, the modern version of “certain groups of people” is no longer women and minorities. It’s now non-traditional students:

students who go to school part time and work part or full time

students with children at home, minority and immigrant students who are culturally bound to be caretakers for their larger family group

English language learners, etc.

This is true for both high school and college settings.

To be conservative, we should probably all assume “implicitly marginalizing” to be our current status, and we should all be looking for ways to move to the right side of the spectrum. If you are already to the right side of the spectrum, this perspective won’t hurt you. Erring in the other direction will.

So, what does classroom environment have to do with cell phones, laptops and your end-of-term scores? There are two pieces here. The first is “motivation,” and the second has to do with “tone.”

MOTIVATION: We sometimes think that “motivation” is a pretty vague thing, but there are people who have thought a lot about it and have broken it down into something that you can chew on. One way to think about student motivation is that it is a mixture of three things:

A. Motivation is about “Value”: Does this class help me meet my goals? Which may be related to intrinsic value of education and the material, but it’s probably not. It has more to do with meeting my social goals, my career goals, etc.

Perhaps the fastest way to reduce the “value” a student sees in your class, is to put your class in conflict with things that the student values more. Like their job, their kids or their family. If I need my cell phone to stay in touch with my child’s caregiver, and you tell me I can’t have my cell phone out to text that caregiver, you have now put us into conflict.

Does this mean that students will sometimes multitask? Yes. And that’s not great. But it would be far worse to set up a system in which we are at odds, and I’m constantly worried about my other obligations. Because if you make me stressed out and anxious about these other things, my amygdala fires and shuts down my hippocampus, and I can neither access nor store memories..,But the neurobiology thing is a whole other thing.

To keep it simple, the syllabus can either show the students a pathway by which they can meet their most cherished goals, or it can show them that the two are in conflict. Conflict = bad evaluations.

B. Motivation is about “self-efficacy.” Can I do this thing that I have to do for this class?

Can we think of ways in which students might use devices like cell phones and laptops, in order to help them get through the class. Yep. Do you want to be the instructor who tries to control student behavior by removing laptops, and inadvertently removes an important educational tool for some students. Nobody does, but we often focus on control so much that we forget to think about whether or not we’re hindering someone unnecessarily.

C. Motivation is about “Perceiving a Supportive Environment”. Does the student perceive that the instructor is creating an environment that will help them be successful, or does the student think things like:

“This instructor does not understand my commitment to my family,”

“This instructor does not understand that I have to be able to text my boss if I want to keep my job—-this instructor only wants to teach the rich who can afford to go to school full time.”

“This instructor doesn’t want me to succeed because she says that I can’t come into class 5 minutes late…but sometimes the bus is late getting me to campus….”

So the question is, for the non-traditional student, does your syllabus increase their sense of value in your class, make them believe that they can use tools to succeed, and does it make them believe that you are supporting them in the difficult task of juggling their education and their other commitments?

It’s funny to think that something so small as a cell phone/laptop or late admittance policy can have such big whammy on student motivation, but it can clearly hit all three pieces of student motivation if handled badly. The research, shows it to be true: replicated, over decades of studies on students in many different types of courses.

BUT, you might say, what can I do to reduce the non-necessary use of cell phones and the off-task use of laptops? Can I put anything in my syllabus? This brings us to:

TONE: Ishiyama and Hartlaub (2002) studied how the tone of a syllabus affects course climate. They found that “students are less likely to seek help from an instructor who worded policies in punitive language.” Given that “instructor accessibility” is an important factor on course evaluations, you don’t want students feeling that way. Sure you have office hours, but if they don’t feel like they can approach you, it doesn’t matter: you are perceived to be unapproachable. In other words, the specific tone (intentional or unconscious) can significantly bring down your instructor accessibility score.

Interestingly enough, instructors could state the exact same policy, but do so in rewarding language, and get a completely different response. In 1985, Rubin described instructors who put policies in boldface block letters, or who promised harsh punishments as “scolders.” Students don’t like scolders. Going back to what was said earlier about motivation, a “scolder” is not perceived to provide a supportive environment. Scolder = low evaluations.

–> PLEASE BE ON TIME vs Please, be on time.

So if you have to have some policy in your syllabus about lateness, phones, laptops, tablets, or whatever the current “control fetish” might be, don’t put it in bold face. Don’t pronounce sever punishments. Don’t create punishments that embarrass students. In other words, don’t act like a Big Bad Guy.

Because, the research has verified that students don’t like instructors who create policies that are counterproductive to their motivation, and who state those policies in a dictatorial manner.

This means that a professor who is serious about improving their course learning environment will ask themselves some hard questions, including:

— > What policies do I enact that might make students feel demeaned, disenfranchised, or disabled from meeting their out-of-class commitments?

— > How can I change the wording on just one thing in my syllabus, to make it seem more hospitable for my students?

Perhaps some specific examples will help. Over the years of helping professors improve their teaching evaluations, we’ve discovered some pretty “inhospitable” syllabi.

Here are some examples definitely worth considering changing:

ONE–

OLD: You must have a scientific calculator for this class that can handle exponential notation.

POSSIBLE NEW WORDING: Although not required every day, a calculator will sometimes be helpful in completing the homework for this class. Any inexpensive one will do just fine, as long as it is labeled “scientific” and one can be purchased for about $12.

TWO–

OLD: Class attendance is REQUIRED!! Class attendance will be record five times throughout the semester – unannounced – and attendance is worth 10% of your grade.

POSSIBLE NEW WORDING: Students who regularly attend class almost always earn better grades and learn more astronomy than students who miss class. Although sometimes missing a class is unavoidable, our class time is specifically designed around collaborative group learning activities that will help you score better on exams. Although you can sometimes do these assignments on your own, talking through these ideas with another student and with the support of your professor will enhance your learning and your grade. Occasionally, these learning tasks will be collected and participation points will be awarded to add to your grade.

THREE–

OLD: Office hours will not be held within 24 hours of the exam.

POSSIBLE NEW WORDING: I will hold extra office hours during the week leading up to the exam and hold an open question-and-answer session at 4pm two days before the exam–bring snacks to share with classmates!

FOUR–

OLD: Class time is important and will always start on time. Do not be late or leave early.

POSSIBLE NEW WORDING: I promise to start and end class on time. I would appreciate it if you did too.

Positive course learning environments can help keep students motivation high in your astronomy class, whereas negative environments too often lead to student failure and dissatisfaction on everyone’s part. Motivation might seem like a difficult nut to crack, but as a first step, we suggest taking a look at your syllabus, or have a critical friend look at your syllabus. You might find that this first step opens up all sorts of doors to improving student motivation and nurturing a more positive class climate.

ANNOUNCEMENT: The Journal of Astronomy & Earth Sciences Education is now accepting manuscripts to be published in 2015.JAESEis a scholarly, peer-reviewed scientific journal publishing original discipline-based education research and evaluation, with an emphasis of significant scientific results derived from ethical observations and systematic experimentation in science education and evaluation. International in scope, JAESE publishes the highest quality and timely articles that advance understanding of astronomy and earth sciences education – broadly defined – and are likely to have a significant impact on the discipline or on policy. Articles are solicited describing both (i) systematic science education research and (ii) evaluated teaching innovations across the broadly defined Earth & space sciences education, including the teaching of:

astronomy

climate education

energy resource science

environmental science

geology

meteorology

oceanography

Interested in sending in a manuscript? Denver Colorado’s Clute Institute publishes the Journal of Astronomy & Earth Sciences Education – JAESE and hosts the journal’s manuscript submission system and publication information, found online at: http://www.jaese.org. The JAESE Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Tim Slater, the University of Wyoming Excellence in Higher Education Endowed Chair of Science Education and a Senior Scientist with the CAPER Center for Astronomy & Physics Education Research, can be contacted via email at: JAESE.Editor@gmail.com

This is a great time to be teaching introductory astronomy. There are an overwhelming number of astronomy and planetary sciences teaching resources available to professors and teachers. To help you navigate this astronomically large universe of astronomy teaching resources, we provide our TOP FIVE list of ready-to-use, high-quality, FREE ASTRONOMY TEACHING MATERIALS as a starting place.

ONE: IMAGE LIBRARY. You need a readily available source of high quality astronomy and planetary science images and explanation to share with your students.

BEST STARTING PLACE: –>Astronomy Picture of the Day “Editor’s Picks” APOD has most comprehensive image library of excellent pictures with readily intelligible descriptions available. Many of these fantastic pictures are subject to copyright, so they don’t often appear in course textbooks, but they can be shown to your students. The APOD Index page provides links to what the editors consider the “best” pictures, but if you want more, there is a giant library available if you use the SEARCH function. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/lib/aptree.html

TWO: CLASSROOM QUESTIONS. You need a source of classroom-ready questions to pose to your students to start discussion and to give them feedback on their developing understanding.

BEST STARTING PLACE: —>ClassAction Think-Pair-Share Questions ClassAction is the first stop for obtaining classroom-ready, think-pair-share voting questions – also known as PeerInstruction and clicker questions – because many of these include attention capturing images as well as available “hints” and “simulations” you can use to help students develop deeper understandings of tough astronomical concepts. http://astro.unl.edu/classaction/questionsList.html

THREE: GRADING SYSTEM. You need a homework assignment strategy to help students engage with astronomy concepts outside of class time.

BEST STARTING PLACE: –> High Performance Grading System If you’re not using an online, automatic homework grading system such as Sapling Learning, WebAssign, or MasteringAstronomy, among many, you need a grading strategy that allows you to assign students homework tasks but not overwhelm you with grading. An easy to implement “High Performance Grading System” dramatically reduces grading time by giving students’ feedback by assigning students with a grade of: 0-no meaningful effort; 1-errors worth discussing with instructor; or 2-few substantive errors. http://astronomy101.jpl.nasa.gov/teachingstrategies/teachingdetails/?StrategyID=3

FOUR: CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES. You need a collection of collaborative group activities to use during class-time to interrupt your lecture and improve student learning.

BEST STARTING PLACE: –> Lecture-Tutorials Classrooms-dominated by professor-centered lecture do not give students sufficient chances to mentally wrestle and internalize with a new concept. An easy-to-adopt approach to implementing classroom activities in the lecture-hall, no matter how large are known as Lecture-Tutorials. A short explanation for how to use Lecture-Tutorials is available online from SERC:

No. Probably not. I seriously doubt it. It’s just not a good idea. and I’m dubious. These are the most common responses all consulted teaching experts give when queried by colleagues about whether or not they should show videos in their introductory astronomy survey class. Sounds pretty negative doesn’t it? This negative reaction is the direct result of seeing professor after professor misuse and abuse otherwise perfectly good videos during class.

It’s not that there aren’t great video resources out there: there really are amazing video resources available in astronomy, perhaps more than any other field (other than oceanography). The number of high production astronomy videos made in the last decade is nothing short of astronomical. Satellite television providers such as the Discovery Channel, History Channel, NASA TV and Science TV have joined the longstanding and highly respected video production efforts of IMAX, PBS, and the National Geographic Society NatGEO TV—just to name a few of the many talented production efforts out there—to super high-production quality videos and video series.

For one, the most highly rated of these videos show the best “talking head” profiles of some of the most influential and photogenic astronomers around. Neil deGrasse Tyson has thousands of social media followers and has even appeared repeatedly on television talk shows like Comedy Channel’s Daily Show with Jon Stewartand the Steven Cobert’s Cobert Report, as well as popular late night television talk shows. These videos go a long way to helping viewers see that astronomy is a human enterprise. Moreover, many of these videos do a reasonably good job of showing today’s astronomers as being highly diverse in racial demographic and quite a few women. The good news here is that television can play a role in helping expand and enhance the stereotypical image of an astronomer from being only a white-haired (or non-haired) white male smoking a pipe in a cold, mountain-top observatory to a more contemporary view of astronomers as being equally likely to being a partying group young males and females from across the racial spectrum. As evidence, I submit to you that the NASA JPL video clips showing young astronomers dancing, yelling, and celebrating during successful Mars landings are enormously popular on video websites like YouTube. Some of these individuals even acquire a tremendous social media following that greatly extends their previously allotted 15 minutes of fame. In other words, these videos can serve to enhance the image of astronomers as people, and perhaps even improve the nation’s evaporating science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) career pipeline.

Perhaps more important than showing astronomers as being a diverse group of people, these videos include the latest and greatest graphics-intensive animations and computer simulations. There are only three words to describe these animations—and all three of them are “WOW.” Many of these animations have a wow-factor that make even the most curmudgeonly critical astronomers look up from their computers and pause to watch. Over the last decade, the entire career field of scientific visualization has stood up to take advantage of and match new computer graphics capabilities with the high-computing power that was once restricted to supercomputers and is now found waiting inside desktop machines. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Scientific Visualization Studio, as but one example, has hundreds of videos ready for Internet download that can be used equally well in television documentaries as well as in astronomy classrooms. In other words, the resources are there and ready to go, so why don’t we just turn them on and let them run for the entire class session? Or even better, if students can watch these amazing videos in the evenings while wearing their bunny slippers, then there doesn’t seem to be any need for students or faculty to go through the hassle of fighting for a parking place and coming to campus at all!

Taken together, the current situation seems to be that we have engaging and good looking speakers describing super high-quality animations just a mouse click away. This entire notion of using videos IN class—or using videos FOR class altogether—sounds like a no brainer, WIN-WIN situation for everyone. This is especially true when you remember that too many astronomy professors are simply terrible lecturers to begin with. (Personal Note: I have been driven to the edge of complete despair watching professors read a textbook to their students in an endless monotone flux too many times to count.) You might be inclined to say, “hey, what are we waiting for? Bring on the videos?”

But, as it seems with every “force” in the universe, there are unfortunate dark sides of using even the highest quality and most scientifically accurate videos in your astronomy class. One has to do with the innate—and perhaps immutable—nature of students. Will students pay attention to a video better than a live lecture? Faculty probably wonder, even if only as an mere idle curiosity, how many of their students are really paying attention to their lecture as the hour wears on. The answer is, not many. We often hear colleagues say, “ah, today’s students just can’t seem to pay attention like they used to.” Of course, those same colleagues are really talking about themselves! Nearly forty years ago, researchers discovered that the worst fears of college lecturers are in fact true: Verner and Dickinson (1967) observed lectures and found that only 66% of students showed the slightest signs of attention to lectures after 18 minutes, compared to the beginning of the lecture. And, worse yet, essentially no students they observed showed signs that they were completely attentive after 35 minutes. That’s not a good omen.

In the end, students are not likely to watch a video with any more interest than they are to watch a lecture. Research backs too backs up this supposition. Fascinating research by Alison Gopnik, author of the famed book Scientist in the Crib, and Patricia Kuhl, studying the development of language, reports in recent research that infants do not learn from video of their mother with nearly the same attention that they will when mom is physically present.

The more argumentative reader might pose that students are able to watch Hollywood movies for hours on end with rapt attention, remembering some of the most obscure details. Again, research helps us understand what is going on. Daniel Willingham proposes in his book, Why Don’t Students Like School, that video material being presented needs to at least have the potential to make an emotional connection with the listener in order to be deeply remembered. Hollywood movies and adventure television shows do this in spades: the damsel in distress ready to be rescued, the seemingly impossible to solve mystery, the hero’s journey from adversity to triumph. One would be greatly surprised if even the most accurate of black hole animations stands well-poised to make an emotional connection for many students—geez, animations generally only seem to barely generate recognizable emotions within professors themselves when videos have glaring mistakes that provoke a professors’ ilk (Do I need to remind you about the Disney movie, “The Black Hole”?).

The other component of a dark side of using videos has to do with the innate nature of professors. By and large, professors seem to be insanely busy people—if you aren’t sure this is true, all you need to do is ask a few and they will be happy to tell you how busy they are. Many professors travel frequently and need to miss class. Because professors are people, when a professor has to miss a class or don’t have time to prepare for class, one seemingly easily implementable solution is to show their class a video. As a substitute for a well-planned lecture, rather than no lecture at all, a video might initially seem like a reasonable option. As pointed out earlier, modern videos have fantastic animations, good looking and well-spoken experts, and sometimes engaging story lines. But the reason we have professors who are experts in the field teach classes is not that they are great speakers—if we only needed great speakers we’d hire actors to teach our classes—rather, we hire experts because they should be able to coach students along the pathway of learning astronomy. When a professor understands the material, they are able to probe students understanding by posing examples and counter examples of different concepts to help students extend their understanding. Moreover, they are able to provide rapid feedback to students who are struggling to learn astronomy in ways that performing actors just can’t do. In other words, it’s the two-way human interaction that is needed, not the attractive downloading of information, which constitutes effective astronomy teaching.

Fortunately, there are some effective strategies to take full advantage of high-quality video resources. One is to use only short video clips of about 3 minutes (5 minutes as an absolute maximum). The key is to have a very specific reason for using the video clip and to fully inform students what they are about to see, why you are showing it to them, and what they are supposed to take away: this is precisely the same tried-and-true presentation skills from physics education research about how to do effective classroom demonstrations. When Thornton and Sokoloff researched interactive lecture demonstrations (ILDs) in teaching physics, they found that what a professor does BEFORE they do a demonstration was much more influential than anything that a professor did after the demonstration. So, that is going to be true with videos too. In fact, one sure-fire strategy is to pause a video (or demonstration) in the middle and ask students to justify predictions about what they think might be going to see next. It really does work!

If you are committed to having students watch a really great, but hour long video presentation—like COSMOS—then the cardinal rule is that instructors need a scheme to help students intellectually participate in and interact with the ideas in the video. Motivated because we are trying to improve the different Internet-based, asynchronous distance learning astronomy courses we teach, we have been experimenting with STUDENT VIDEO DISCUSSION GUIDE worksheets.

Student Video Discussion Guide

The general idea underlying the STUDENT VIDEO DISCUSSION GUIDEis to keep the student intellectually engaged with the video while it is playing. Leveraging Bloom’s Taxonomy, we present the students with three distinct levels of questions. For an hour-long video, we first ask four to eight factual, knowledge-level questions from the video. An example is, How far above Earth’s surface is the Hubble Space Telescope? The point of these first-tier questions are to help students focus on the more relevant facts shared in the video. The second thing we pose to students are two to four deeper level, synthesis and evaluation questions from the video. An example is, “Were the Hubble’s observations of Mars or Saturn the most scientifically valuable?” Finally, we post one or two self-reflection questions. The point of these questions is to attempt to make the information in the video more emotionally relevant to students so that they have a better chance of internalizing the ideas. An example of one of these self-reflection questions is, “Of the many Hubble images shown, which 12 HST images would you pick to use in a calendar and why?” To be clear, we give the students the questions on the STUDENT VIDEO DISCUSSION GUIDEbefore the video starts and encourage them to look over the questions before the video starts so that they know precisely what that are looking for while watching the video. You can find many examples of these STUDENT VIDEO DISCUSSION GUIDES in the Astronomy Faculty Lounge at http://astronomy.facultylounge.whfreeman.com/ by searching the resources under VIDEOS.

We began this discussion by saying, NO, you really shouldn’t use videos in your classroom. In the end, I don’t really believe that—I was trying to catch your attention by being a bit contrarian. The truth is that there are amazing video resources available for teaching astronomy. However, astronomy education research clearly shows that it is irresponsible just to turn on the video as a classroom babysitter and hope that students will benefit. Like using textbook reading assignments, LECTURE TUTORIALS FOR INTRODUCTORY ASTRONOMY, or online homework systems, videos too need to have a specific educational purpose for their inclusion and their rationale explained to students to generate their buy in. In other words, for videos to be effective, you need to successfully convince students that the videos used will specifically help them get a better grade in your course and, most importantly, will help students learn more astronomy.

Even before I became a textbook author, I was party to more than one water cooler conversation about whether or not faculty should require students to purchase textbooks [viz., http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/astrolrner/message/4958]. Now, that I am an introductory astronomy textbook author, I still feel the same way—there are some benefits to assigning a textbook to students and, more importantly, tremendous risks in not doing so.

Most folks who have moved away from textbooks entirely face a pretty serious problem in that the professor, and the professor’s notes, all too often can become the sole source of knowledge and expertise in the class. Sure students CAN go look up stuff and get another perspective, but my sense is that they don’t, and perhaps don’t even know how to do so effectively given the variety of presentations professors give. In the case where there is no clear supporting textbook readings assigned to students, the end result is an implicit and sizeable pressure on students—probably completely unintended by the professor— to memorize nearly everything that their professors say (or type onto a PowerPoint slide). It is these “memorized transcripts” that end up being what students are able to answer on exams. At the same time, a hidden social contract in the introductory astronomy class causes professors themselves to feel a sizeable pressure to only ask questions about what they specifically talk about in class. For my money, this is a LOSE-LOSE bet. When I consider all of this, it seems to me that the astronomy professor’s job should be about linking students’ thinking to the ideas of astronomy and giving students feedback about how well they are learning the concepts, not about being responsible for delivering astronomy ideas in their entirety.

Some folks have tried using trade books or coffee table books or extensive fact-based web sites. Although these are attractive, particularly in how they are illustrated, they lack the tried-and-true pedagogical tools that many, many students, publishers, and authors have worked through and tried to perfect over the years – explicitly stated learning goals, headings to structure student thinking, end of chapter summaries with review questions, and, gasp, even bold faced words to help focus student attention. I’m not saying that these things are perfect and are not often overused, BUT, what I would say is that these pedagogical clues are important enough to student readers that having them in a textbook is more important than the pretty pictures and pedagogy-free writing of coffee table books.

There is a dark side here, in that some students are preferentially disadvantaged more than other students when astronomy faculty purposefully choose not to assign readings connected to their teaching from a textbook—those are the students who already struggle with learning from your lecture. CAPER’s Stephanie J. Slater argues in Astrolrner Post #5014:

Stephanie Slater

Teaching using a textbook as a tool is pedagogical skill well worth learning. There is ample research out there that suggests that texts are important resources for many students, including those students who are most in need of extra help. Many students cannot take notes and listen to lecture at the same time. Students with specific learning disabilities, reduced working memories, who are second language learners, or who have poor spatial reasoning skills, struggle to glean concepts and facts from lecture. Non-text readings that are not structured with the coherence usually found in a textbook, or with the learning cues found in many texts, make life harder for our students who have ADD, reduced working memory, who are visually impaired, have visual-neurological dysfunction, or who have reduced access to technology.

So, for my money, I think using an astronomy textbook is an important part of the introductory science survey course. Yes, they can be expensive, but in the grand scheme of things that go into a college education, textbooks really aren’t. My most convincing evidence is that the $45 that students pay for the LECTURE TUTORIALS FOR INTRODUCTORY ASTRONOMY initially seems outrageous for a “work book” BUT, students rarely complain because they really, really use the book as part of their learning and they find it valuable. If students felt that the astronomy textbook helped them learn the material and they found it valuable, they wouldn’t care if it cost $235 (of course, if you haven’t looked at the half priced e-books or loose-leaf for students as an significantly lower cost option, you should talk to the next textbook sales representative that comes through the door – these lower-price alternatives are getting really attractive!).

I think the consistent problem that most astronomy faculty face related to textbooks is nothing short of simply OPERATOR ERROR. If professors never ask students to be responsible for learning from the textbook without the instructor repeating or, even worse, and I’ve seen it, reading from the textbook during lecture, then why would students ever think a textbook is valuable. This problem is much better documented in physics than astronomy, where too many physics professors don’t’ use the textbook for anything other than problems at the end of the chapter. Eric Mazur says that, even at Harvard, students won’t read unless you require it of them. My experience is that this applies no matter what your student demographic is. (I add this additional provocation for those who are about to say, “but my community college students couldn’t possibly read the book.” I don’t see any truly convincing evidence of this–readability on astronomy books show that many are purposefully done at pre-high school reading-level anyway.)

Speaking for a moment as a textbook author, one thing that I have definitely learned is that no textbooks end up being perfectly accurate – even after tens of people read and comment and carefully check the drafts. Errors do somehow frustratingly slip through the textbook creation process—and some faculty out there love to find and point out those errors! However, I’m absolutely sure that if 25 experts were to look at your PowerPoint slides and listen to your lectures, very few of any of us are error free in our presentations. Unless you’ve had 25 experts review your lectures, you’re probably guilty of giving out some misinformation. Textbooks at least have had some (gulp, a lot, usually) expert review. The other thing I’ve learned that I didn’t fully understand before is that modern textbooks have pedagogical tools, as mentioned above, that really do matter to novice readers. Websites, nor trade books, often have these things that really do help students learn the material more efficiently, particularly struggling ones.

My thinking is that students should be required to learn from the textbook and that portions of exams should be allocated to material from the textbook that is NOT specifically covered in lecture, but students are specifically made aware of what they are to learn. I don’t want to spend my valuable class time telling them facts they can read in a much more precise and attractive language than I can “say” during class time. This doesn’t mean that you should abdicate your responsibility to helping students learn—however, if you are only asking your students to memorize what you say in class, you are missing a grand opportunity to teach students how to find, understand, and internalize material on their own. And, for many of us, we hope that we are helping our students, at least a little bit, become more talented life-long learners.

It’s all too easy to forget that what students hold as their personal definition of learning. In other words, theories of learning teachers hold isn’t the only thing that matters; what also matters are the theories of learning astronomy students hold themselves. Perhaps surprisingly, theories of learning students hold can be an influential consideration on the part of teachers when making instructional decisions. If students and teachers have very different views on what it means to learn astronomy, then conflict is certain to exist. If this theoretical conflict isn’t resolved, then the practice of teaching and learning astronomy is likely to fail. Moreover, because students’ theories of learning are often hard earned through years of taking and being graded on tests, they are likely to be deeply entrenched. In addition, students’ theories of learning are often culturally-based, and sometimes even gender-based, giving considerable inertia to their definitions of what it means to learn resulting in something arduously difficult, if not impossible, to move.

On one hand, students may have come to believe that learning is synonymous with memorization. In other words, if students can repeat word-for-word the definitions given to them by their astronomy teacher, then they have learned astronomy. Award winning secondary level astronomy teacher Keith Goering from the Midwestern US, is famously known for joking, “if you can says it, then you must knows it.” Students who have adopted this definition of learning are characterized by making flash-cards on small pieces of two-sided paper with bold-faced vocabulary words on one side and text-book definitions on the other side. If they were to fail a test, the only reasons could be that the instructor asked purposefully tricky or deceptive questions or that the students themselves simply didn’t work hard enough to memorize a sufficient number of details. Many students have become convinced that memorization is equivalent to learning because such a factual perspective has been represented to them on test after test after test over their broad school experience.

On the other hand, students may believe that learning requires much more than memorization, but requires deep understanding. For most students, the notion of understanding is probably somewhat ill-defined. For scholars, there are a variety of ways to characterize understanding. The most common description of understanding used in the US is that of thinking about understanding ranging from having a shallow and superficial knowledge of an idea to that of holding deep understanding. Widely attributed to University of Chicago Professor Benjamin Bloom and known as Bloom’s Taxonomy, this decades-old hierarchical description of understanding is a six-level description ranging from shallow learning (i) knowledge and (ii) comprehension to a more moderate understanding of (iii) application and (iv) analysis to the deepest levels of understanding of (v) synthesis and (iv) evaluation. In contrast, more recently scholars have been describing understanding as being flexible and multi-faceted—a horizontal view rather than a vertical view if you will. Widely popularized in the US by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005) in their Understanding by Design work, a complete understanding of an idea can be also described as having six different facets: Explanation, Interpretation, Application, Perspective, Empathy, and Self-Knowledge. In the end, whichever scholarly description of understanding students adopt implicitly or explicitly, the stark distinction between understanding and memorization is pronounced and strongly poised to influence how students approach the learning of astronomy. Most importantly, students’ views and their teachers’ theories of what it means to learn astronomy—and what their grades mean—benefit greatly from being aligned.

Astronomy by Inquiry: A Highly Student-Centered Instructional Strategy. For many years, it has been common practice to ask students to complete astronomy assignments and astronomy laboratory exercises in the process of learning astronomy that look absolutely nothing like what astronomers actually do. For example, countless astronomy students have used pencils to trace out ellipses with loose string on small square-box graph paper and count tiny squares to “prove” Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion. Perhaps even more students have carefully plotted the precise right ascension and declination positions of hundreds of stars to re-create the constellations and asterism of the night sky on small square-box graph paper to make their own star maps—star maps that are rarely ever used. If a teacher believes, instead, that students learning astronomy should actually be doing astronomy, then the traditional activities need to be discarded. Undoubtedly, this is not the creative and imaginative work that characterizes astronomy.

Recently, work by Stephanie Slater and colleagues (2010, 2013) at the CAPER Center for Astronomy & Physics Education Research in the USA has focused on developing learning experiences purposefully designed to mimic that daily work of a research astronomer. Known awkwardly as BACKWARDS FADED SCAFFOLDING LABS for historical reasons, this approach uses an underlying learning theory that states that novice students need extended and repeated engagements with scientific investigations in order to develop skills at participating in scientific inquiry (These are published by Stephanie Slater and colleagues under the name ENGAGING IN ASTRONOMICAL INQUIRY). To leverage this idea of the importance of repeated intellectual engagements, the backwards faded scaffolding labs ask students to complete five shorter scientific investigations on a topic, as opposed to the conventional approach pursuing a single, longer scientific investigation.

The reason that these BFS labs are referred to as scaffolded, is that students are led through a specific instructional sequence where students are initially provided substantial amounts of support. The instructor-supplied student support is slowly removed over the course of the laboratory learning experience—such that the lessons scaffolds are faded. By the end of each lesson, students are able to devise and complete a scientific investigation in astronomy all on their own. In this way, students gain confidence in their ability to conduct scientific inquiry in astronomy by gaining more responsibility for the learning from the beginning to the end of instruction.

The BFS labs are also known for being backwards because of how the scaffolds are carefully faded. In the most common instructional approaches where students are taught how to conduct scientific inquiry, teachers teach scientific inquiry in three phases. The first phase is to teach students how to ask scientifically fruitful questions. Second, students are taught to design experiments and observations to pursue evidence. Finally, students are typically taught how to extract evidence from data and create an evidence-based astronomy conclusion.

What is particularly unique about these learning astronomy BFS laboratory learning experiences is the recognition that teaching students to ask scientifically fruitful questions is by far the most difficult aspect. In response, the BFS astronomy lessons teach students to create and defend evidence-based conclusions first from a given research question and given data. Then, students are taught to devise strategies to pursue data that can be used in an evidenced-based conclusion for a new research question, which is also provided for them. Only when students have had considerable experience designing observations and defending conclusions from a number of research questions, are students then taught to create fruitful research questions—now that they have considerable experience doing the processes of scientific inquiry in astronomy.

An instructional sequence in scientific inquiry might be to ask students to use an online database of solar system planets showing the planet and moon positions and motions to pursue a series of investigations. An example series of investigations might be to (i) determine the length of time our Sun spins by monitoring sunspots moving across the surface, (ii) determine how long it takes Jupiter to spin by monitoring the reappearance of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, (iii) determine how long it take Io to spin, (iv) determine how long it takes Io to orbit Jupiter, and (v) create your own research project on motions of the solar system. Two consistently great resources for this can be found by searching the Internet for NASA EYES ON THE SKY and JPL SOLAR SYSTEM SIMULATOR. But what is vitally important here is that in each case, students are deeply engaged in a progressive series of questions, where the teacher gives substantively less support with each following investigation.

Several thousand astronomy students have used these Backwards Faded Scaffolding inquiry materials with varying degrees of success. By and large, our experience is that most people who have used them, continue to use them course after course. At the same time, talented teachers are creating their own BFS labs to cover concepts across the domain of astronomy, and even moving into other disciplines. For one, there is an online discussion group e-community for BFS-Labs that you can join by heading over to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bfs-labs. There is even a YouTube video on backwards faded scaffolding http://www.youtube.com/user/CAPERTeamTube. Many of these new and community created BFS-Labs are archived and freely available at the Astronomy Faculty Lounge which can be accessed through a portal at the CAPER Center for Astronomy & Physics Education Research website at www.caperteam.com (Slater & Slater, 2013).

Concluding Thoughts about Influences of Theory and Practice in Teaching Astronomy

In moving from a teacher-centered classroom to a learner-centered classroom, teachers need to sometimes make dramatic changes in their adopted underlying philosophies of teaching astronomy and guiding theories of learning. In particular, classrooms that greatly value respect students thinking, start where the students are cognitively, and move all students as individuals are learner-centered. In contrast, in a teacher-centered classroom, all students learn the same facts and the goal is to get them all to the same ending place. How one decides to teach relies heavily on what the end goal is. Teachers have different end goals, and as a result, should have different teaching approaches (see Slater & Zeilik, (2003) for numerous examples of various astronomy teaching approaches).

There are undoubtedly some teachers who loudly state they hold a particular teaching philosophy and use specific theories of learning that are actually in direct conflict with what is observed in their classroom. In other words, there can be large differences between stated theory and actual classroom teaching practice. Sometimes this is completely unintentional in that a single teacher cannot themselves know all of the possible teaching strategies and it does happen that a teacher doesn’t know how to teach in a way that is consistent with their stated theory. More often, though, teachers know what the culturally accepted theory of teaching is, and purposefully use something different in the practice of teaching. This conflict can lead to tremendous challenges between different teachers of similar topics.

As we look toward the evolving future, it is perhaps the concept of “The Flipped Classroom” that has the greatest potential for making classroom’s more learner-centered. A far too brief description of flipping the astronomy classroom is a classroom in which the students do homework assignments and activities in the classroom in front of the teacher and students hear lectures and receive new astronomy information outside of class, usually being given information through Internet videos (Slater, 2013). In other words, the process is flipped about where students do homework and where students listen to lectures. This approach hold the best promise so far for helping teachers become learning coaches rather than information dispensers and moving toward being more learner-centered.

Mike Bennett, Previous Director of Astronomical Society of the Pacific

A recent beloved Executive Director of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Mike Bennett, the well-respected astronomy and planetarium educator was well known for the quip, “You know what the difference between theory and practice is? In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. However, in practice, there is!” If you understand why you make the teaching decisions you make, then you are much better positioned to make consistent decisions about which of the many teaching innovations available will best fit into your continuous effort at improving your teaching and your students learning in astronomy.

It is all too often easy to forget that learning theories obviously or quietly influence what classroom environments look like. On one hand, theories of learning used in classrooms where the teacher is the expert source of all knowledge are known as TEACHER-CENTERED classrooms. This is where the learning theory guiding the classroom put the teacher in the role to perform and present—perhaps download—information and ideas to the class. Teacher-centered classrooms are focused on the performance and presentation of the teacher, and improving these classrooms focus on the teacher being the one to be making better presentations and better lectures with better illustrations, examples, and analogies. On the other hand, classrooms could be focused on what students are doing every day instead of what teachers are doing. This perspective is in stark contrast to that of student-centered classrooms, or LEARNER-CENTERED teaching. Improvements in learner-centered classrooms instead focus on changing the student experience by having students talk about and sort out concepts, rather than being told what they should think and believe about scientific ideas. Although it isn’t clear than one is always better than the other, what is certain is that learning theories driving the design and operation of learner-centered classrooms look very different.

A contrasting theory of learning that is more learner-centered is that of CONCEPTUAL CHANGE. Widely advocated by US-based Peter Hewsen and his talented colleagues like Strike and Posner (1982, 1992) in the later Twentieth Century, conceptual change is based on the notion of teaching students who enter learning already holding ideas they have developed with considerable mental effort. In response, it is the job of the teacher to build an environment that exposes students’ initial ideas, challenges the students’ thinking, and replaces the pre-existing astronomy ideas with new and better ideas. Long-time physics education researcher Lillian Chris McDermott and her colleagues (2001) at the University of Washington (USA) describe teaching aligned with this theory of learning as elicit, confront and resolve. Clearly, classical conceptual change in astronomy teaching has an underlying commitment to the teaching philosophy of constructivism, as briefly described above.

For a teacher who subscribes to conceptual change as a theory of learning, a teacher’s job is to find and help students replace their astronomy misconceptions with scientifically accurate ideas. Whereas a positivist instructor would hold the position that simply telling students that they have a misconception and that the correct ideas should over-write the incorrect ideas, a teacher subscribing to conceptual change believes that new ideas will only be considered if there is dissatisfaction with old ideas. Moreover the newly proposed ideas have to be completely understandable and be able to better explain a wider range of ideas than the old ideas for conceptual change to successfully apply.

Early classroom applications of conceptual change were focused on using a three-phase learning cycle, advocated widely by Karplus and Butts (1977). The first phase of such a learning cycle is exploration were students wrestled with a phenomena or observation that was unexpected, known in education circles as a decrepit event, and presented to astronomy students without an explicit agenda revealed by the teacher. Some example decrepit events in astronomy teaching might be: (a) if it is hotter in the summertime because we are close to the Sun, why might the northern and southern hemisphere seasons be reversed?; (b) if our Moon has no gravity, how did astronauts successfully walk on our Moon?; (c) if planets spin more slowly the farther they are from the Sun, why might Jupiter spin faster than Saturn?; (d) if main sequence stars move on the HR diagram toward the right when they run out of useable fuel in their core, just where might they move to in outer space?; and (e) if we can determine which direction our galaxy is moving in an evolving Universe by looking for redshifts in one direction and blue shifts in the opposite direction, what might it mean if we observe red shifts in all directions?.

The second of the three phases in the classical learning cycle is that of concept introduction. In this phase, astronomy teachers are to tie the descript event to the scientifically accurate idea, usually through a didactic, lecture-based strategy. It is in this phase where students are introduced to the accurate scientific vocabulary that better describes the ideas they wrestled with in initial the exploration phase. This cycle is then closed by a third phase known as concept application, where students are to practice applying their new thinking in novel applications. Taken together, a teaching practice aligned with this theory is to repeatedly have students engage with phenomena and come to a more meaningful understanding.

In the decades following Karplus, this three-phase approach has been expanded to a five-phase approach. Advocated by US science educator Roger Bybee (2002), who was then working in the domain of Biology Education, the 5E approach has gained favor among teachers and curriculum developers. The 5E approach phases are Explore, Engage, Explain, Extend, and Evaluate. Whether a teacher thinks the better teaching practice here is to use a 3-phase or a 5-phase, or even a 10-phase learning cycle, the underlying theory here is that students will better learn an astronomical concept if they have targeted and repeated engagements with the idea, rather than a single, isolated experience. Where these student-centered learning phases starkly contrast from the teacher-centered information download practice of teaching is that students’ initial ideas are taken to be serious and influential parts of the learning process and purposeful mechanisms exist to include, alter, and extend students’ thinking.

In recent years, conceptual change theory has been more serious modified to include students’ attitudes and motivation for learning. The changes in conceptual change theory are due in large part, to a broad failure for conceptual change learning cycles to work with emotionally-laden topics. Astronomy teachers using conceptual change have often noticed that providing students with discrepant events and data intended to cause internal cognitive conflict driving conceptual change in particular domains had little to no impact. Most notably, the astronomy topics seemingly largely immune to conceptual change were: astrology as influencing human events, Big Bang Theory of the creation of universe (Prather, Slater, Offerdahl, 2002), the Expanding Universe, evolution of planetary atmospheres as a result of biological evolution, and anthropogenic (human-caused) planetary climate change, among others. In other words, in the practice of teaching through conceptual change, no amount of data or logical argumentation seemed to alter some students thinking about such issues. In response, parts of conceptual change theory have been altered to account for emotionally-laden issues where students’ self-identity is threatened by a particular scientific idea. Known widely as “hot” conceptual change theory, the teaching practice that shows some promise for enhancing student’s thinking in these domains is one of having students evaluate the thinking of other people from afar, perhaps as case studies or consideration of mini-debates among other people, rather than engaging the students’ own thinking. The underlying idea is that students will more readily evaluate the thinking of others than themselves. Such practices are seen as less risky to students’ self-identity and allow for a considerate teacher to more respectfully present and challenge opposing points of view. (For more on this hot conceptual change, see work by US science educator Doug Lombardi and his colleagues (2010) in this domain.)

Lecture-Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy: An Instructional Strategy In-between a Teacher-Centered and a Student-Centered Approach. To take advantage of students’ needs to have guided and extended experiences in understanding a new idea, Jeff Adams and Tim Slater, then at Montana State University in the US, led a team developing a series of instructional materials called LECTURE TUTORIALS FOR INTRODUCTORY ASTRONOMY (Prather, Slater, Adams & Brissenden, 2004 & 2012). Lecture Tutorials were designed to combine the advantages of SOCRATIC DIALOGUE teaching approaches with the collaborative activity benefits from THINK-PAIR-SHARE.

Lecture-Tutorials are carefully designed worksheets that students collaboratively complete in pairs. Each worksheet takes 10-15 minutes to complete and is used during class time after a short lecture to help students extend their understanding and demonstrate the power of astronomy models. Upon inspection, the questions posed on the worksheets are similar to the series of questions a considerate teacher might ask a struggling student if they were tutoring the student in a one-on-one face-to-face setting after class. In this way, Lecture-Tutorials are designed to move students from a novice understanding of an idea to a more comprehensive understanding (Brogt, 2007).

A strategy highly characteristic of these worksheets is to ask students to evaluate a conversation between two students. Often described as a MINI-DEBATE (see Slater, 2010), the worksheets provide a short quoted dialogue between two students. For example, one student might be portrayed as saying to another student, “the Moon has not water because it has no gravity” who then responds by saying, “The Moon does have gravity, like any other planet, and the Moon’s water is frozen as un-melted ice in deep craters that never are exposed to sunlight.” The learners using the Lecture-Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy are then asked to craft a response to the question of which student, if either, do you agree with. In this way, students are given the opportunity to safely judge the accuracy of distant hypothetical students’ thinking rather than directly confront their own personal thinking. In this sense, the task is less risky than revealing their own personal views and are apt to take more risks at exposing their own potentially incorrect thinking, thus positioning themselves to learn complex astronomy ideas themselves.

More than 100,000 astronomy students have used Lecture-Tutorials with varying degrees of success. By and large, our experience is that most people who have used them, continue to use them course after course. At the same time, talented teachers are creating Lecture-Tutorials to cover concepts across the domain of astronomy, and even moving into other disciplines. There is even a 15-min. YouTube video on how to make your own available at http://www.youtube.com/user/CAPERTeamTube.

Many of these new and community created Lecture-Tutorials are archived and freely available at the Astronomy Faculty Lounge which can be accessed through the FACULTY LOUNGE portal at the CAPER Center for Astronomy & Physics Education Research website at www.caperteam.com (Slater & Slater, 2013).